Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain

by Richard North

  In the air on this day, there were no great battles. There was activity on the East Coast, with occasional forays over Dover and Plymouth. One Heinkel bombed properties in Sunderland. Four people were killed and seventy-eight injured. The aircraft was shot down and crashed into the sea off Whitburn. In South Shields, a bomb fell in a garden in a residential area. Four people in an Anderson Shelter, 10 ft from the crater, were uninjured. One Home Guard was killed by machine-gun fire. A Heinkel was shot down by AA gunfire during operations near Flamborough Head.

  Overnight, a lone bomber, thought to be searching for Fort Dunlop or the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory, released its bombs over suburban Birmingham. The very first bomb on the city severely damaged two houses and killed an 18-year-old cinema projectionist. Several others caused slight damage.21 A stick of five fell on a house in the Prenton district of Birkenhead, across the water from Liverpool, claiming the life of a maid, 30-year-old Johanna Mandale.22 She was the first of 442 to be killed in the town, with 606 injured. On the day, Fighter Command flew 409 sorties, losing two aircraft. Bomber Command lost a Blenheim and Coastal Command an Anson. The Luftwaffe lost four aircraft.

  At Chequers that evening, Churchill discussed the attack on the “Peewit” convoy with Minister of War, Anthony Eden, and a group of his senior military staff, including the First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound. He approved of the idea of using the convoys as “bait”, although he acknowledged that “surviving bait are getting fed up”. In drawing the Germans into battle, Churchill asserted, we stood to lose little. Pound stated that there was a surplus of coastal vessels, while the air battles demonstrated to the world that we were superior to the Germans. The enemy must be less powerful in the air than we supposed, he mused, for if their strength was as great as we believed, they would have come again today and would be bombing our ports incessantly.

  Colville retailed how Eden could not understand why the Germans expended so great an effort against “comparatively unimportant objects”. It was suggested to him that they still thought they could starve us out and did not understand “the unimportance of these coastal convoys”. They seemed to know less of the importance of their own coastal trade than did the Germans. But the very fact that so much effort was being expended on non-military targets hardly suggested a commitment to an imminent invasion.23

  DAY 32 – SATURDAY 10 AUGUST 1940

  It was a cloudy day with some rain. Göring decided to wait before launching his grand offensive. Eagle Attack was postponed for three days. Fighter Command, therefore, experienced “exceptionally light” enemy activity. For longer than some could remember, there were no losses. Nevertheless, there was action over the Channel and Me 110 pilots attempted a surprise evening strike on Norwich. A lone Dornier put eleven bombs close to RAF West Malling.

  The German Naval High Command was concerned about further slippage in Sealion. The war diary noted that mine clearance is being affected by the inactivity of the Luftwaffe “which is at present prevented from operating by the bad weather”. The diary added that “for reasons not known to the Naval Staff”, the Luftwaffe had also missed opportunities afforded by the very recent good weather. Here, the German Navy was focusing on the issues on which a successful invasion would depend. The Air Force had been attacking “Peewit” and other non-invasion related targets. And the Army, after the abortive discussions between Halder and Schniewind, was appealing to higher authority. In a memorandum to the Supreme Command, the General Staff reiterated its demands for a broad front landing.24

  During the night, the Luftwaffe attacked Bristol Docks and leaflets were dropped over Bristol. Bombs fell for the first time on Abergavenny, Rochester and Wallasey, along with heavy raids on Weymouth. Serious damage was done to the Llandore GWR (Great Western Railway) viaduct near Swansea where a direct hit on a shelter killed five. He 111s hit Swansea itself and fifteen people were killed. It was difficult to see the relevance of these targets to an invasion in southern England. As for the “score”, no fighters but three British bombers were lost, against two Luftwaffe losses, one a take-off accident in a Me 109, when the pilot was killed.

  Despite the overarching threat of invasion, many people were far more concerned about the damage being caused by German air activity. Much dissatisfaction was being expressed at the lack of protection, with complaints of insufficient numbers of barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns. These complaints were passed to the Air Ministry, which had Air Vice-Marshal Peck warning, in particular, of the lack of public protection in Swansea, where there was a major refinery.25

  The Air Ministry, meanwhile, was “correcting” the previous day’s score, adding seven further kills to bring the total number of aircraft lost by the Germans on the day to sixty. The War Cabinet had been told that fifty-two enemy aircraft had been shot down. A further fourteen were “unconfirmed”. It was also told that British casualties amounted to seenteen fighters and a Blenheim “engaged on a training flight”. With the actual casualty rate standing at twenty-one, this was close to the number actually lost. The claim then that “several of our pilots have been rescued”, was less candid. A more truthful statement might have been: “very few of our pilots have been rescued”.

  There was also a certain stridency with which the government insisted its figures were correct. After an air battle, it asserted: “RAF crews engaged made reports which are carefully compiled, together with pictures taken by the camera gun carried on every British fighter”.26 This “gun”, it was claimed, registered a picture with every burst of machine-gun fire, and also recorded the time. However, few cameras were fitted to RAF fighters before September 1940, and then mainly as training aids.27

  As to the shipping losses, the official British claim was “three small ships” sunk by the E-boats, totalling 2,500 tons. That was accurate, although an E-boat was claimed destroyed, with a second one badly damaged, which was not true. And no mention was made of the two ships damaged. The air attack toll was similarly distorted. The British claimed two ships lost, totalling another 2,500 tons, and seven damaged. In fact, five ships had been sunk, totalling just short of 5,000 tons. Five merchantmen had been damaged, plus two anti-submarine yachts and four anti-submarine trawlers. Neither the British nor the Germans, who claimed fifteen ships and 72,000 tons, produced reliable figures.

  DAY 33 – SUNDAY 11 AUGUST 1940

  Readers of the Sunday Express were greeted with a detailed map on the front page, identifying towns and cities which had suffered bombing from the Germans. Places such as Swansea, Pembroke, Exeter and even Dumbarton in Scotland were identified. It had been compiled by Time magazine, reliant entirely on German sources, but it was uncannily accurate. And the title to the map was: “Battle of Britain: Bombings June 18 to July 21”.

  A narrative on the previous day’s raids was consigned to the back page, where the headline, “Biggest day of raids: 7 hit by bullets” covered a story with remarkably little detail. The censor had been at work and the locations described were all vague, such as a “south-east town” and the “north-east”. In the former, workers had been attacked by a Dornier, and then machine-gunned.

  There was a brief reference to an attack on a hospital and then, from another south-east district, there was the almost obligatory account of how a family had been saved by their shelter. “I scoffed at Anderson shelters till now,” said a Mr A. White, standing amid the wreckage of his home, “but ours saved the lives of my wife and two daughters.” However, the impact, so to speak, of this account was somewhat diminished by the experience of a Mrs Thornley, whose house had been wrecked by a bomb and she had been buried in the debris. When extricated, she had been found to be “practically unhurt”. She had been in the bath when the bomb had fallen.

  This day, a Sunday, was supposedly a day of rest. But for many, it was another day of life-and-death struggle. The air war started early when at 7.30 a.m., Me 109s and 110s attacked Dover. Spitfires roared in to intercept.

  About this time, alarmed by the growing toll of
pilots lost at sea, Keith Park succeeded in borrowing some Lysander aircraft to work systematically with rescue launches and other craft, a step towards building an air-sea rescue service.28 How much they were needed was highlighted by the “not unrepresentative” experience of Pilot Officer Stevenson sent to intercept the Dover raid.29 After mixing it with a group of Me 109s and being forced to bale out at high altitude (23,000 ft), Stevenson had drifted eleven miles out to sea on his parachute before hitting the water. He then recalled:

  One string of my parachute did not come undone, and I was dragged along by my left leg at ten miles an hour with my head underneath the water. After three minutes I was almost unconscious, when the string came undone. I got my breath back and started swimming. There was a heavy sea running. After one and a half hours an MTB came to look for me. I fired my revolver at it. It went out of sight, but came back. I changed magazines and fired all my shots over it. It heard my shots and I kicked up a foam in the water, and it saw me. It then picked me up and took me to Dover.

  With Stevenson yet to receive his chilling baptism, the Dover attack was done. But it was a mere prelude. A formation of 165 bombers and Me 110s, escorted by fighters, was on its way from the Cherbourg area to attack the Portland naval base and Weymouth. This was the largest single raid so far. Nine squadrons raced to intercept, only to become tangled in a massive dogfight that spread across the entire width of Weymouth Bay at heights up to 23,000 ft. The bombers ran in at 15,000 ft to drop their bombs, setting naval oil tanks on fire. HMS Scimitar was damaged by near misses, and the destroyer HMS Skate took numerous near misses which wrecked her bridge.

  Pilot Officer J. S. B. Jones was one of those shot down. He baled out and landed in the Channel. Three Spitfires, supported by Blenheim fighters, were ordered up to look for him. They came across an He 59 riding on the sea thirty miles off Cherbourg, recovering Luftwaffe airmen, protected by six circling Me 109s. The Spitfires held off the fighters while the Blenheims destroyed the seaplane. When another He 59, from Calais, flew into the area, it was shot down as well, but two Spitfires were downed by the German escorts, killing their pilots. Neither Jones nor his parachute was seen. His body was later recovered and buried in France.

  Others were still fighting for their lives. Among them was the crew of the destroyer HMS Windsor, damaged by German bombing off the Botany Buoy in the Thames Estuary. Destroyer HMS Esk was lightly damaged at Harwich. An armed trawler, HMT Edwardian, hit by a bomb, had to be run aground at North Foreland. The trawler Peter Carey took a hit but her crew managed to save her. Elsewhere, the steamer Kirnwood was damaged by bombing, as was the tanker Oil Trader.

  On the day, Fighter Command lost thirty-one aircraft. A Royal Navy Fulmar was lost near Aberdour and an Anson failed to return after a patrol. Bomber Command lost five aircraft, bringing British losses to thirty-eight. The Luftwaffe lost thirty-six. Of the thirty-one single-seat RAF fighters downed, twenty-five pilots had been killed. The Germans had lost nine Me 109 pilots, including one taken prisoner. Two had been rescued unhurt and one had crashed on home territory. The British were exchanging nearly three fighter pilots for every German.

  In propaganda terms, however, this had been a clear win for the British. The RAF claimed fifty “kills”, a figure which was rapidly inflated to sixty – against twenty-four losses. Duff Cooper was jubilant. He predicted that Britain would soon establish air superiority. “Just as we retain command of the seas,” he said, “so we are rapidly assuming command of the air”.30 Leo Amery, the Secretary for India, delivered a similar buoyant message in a speech at Blackpool.31

  Churchill shared the optimistic mood. “I do not think the German Air Force has the numbers or quality to overpower our Air defences”, he wrote to Robert Menzies and Peter Frazer, the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand. Furthermore, the Navy was increasing in strength each month, and he expected over 500 new vessels to have joined the fleet in the period from June to December. He told his prime ministerial colleagues:

  [t]o try to transport a large army, as would now be needed for success, across the seas virtually without Naval escort in the face of our Navy and Air Force, only to meet our powerful military force on the shore, still less to maintain such an army and nourish its lodgements with munitions and supplies, would be a very unreasonable act.

  “On the other hand,” he mused, “if Hitler fails to invade and conquer Britain before the weather breaks, he has received his first and probably his fatal check.” With that, the Prime Minister conveyed a “sober and growing conviction of our power to persevere through the year or two that may be necessary to gain victory”.32

  DAY 34 – MONDAY 12 AUGUST 1940

  This was the day when it became a criminal offence to feed the ducks in Regents Park. So said the Daily Express, which sternly warned that, under defence regulations, “wilful waste of food fit for human consumption” was now prohibited, on pain of a £500 penalty. Presumably by way of balance, the British papers offered news of unremitting victory: “60 of 400 raiders shot down”, blared the Daily Telegraph. It told of the Luftwaffe suffering “another humiliating defeat”. For the second time in four days, “60 German bombers and fighters were shot down”. The triumphal cry of the Daily Express was more succinct: “Again!” Again the propaganda was concealing a small net loss.

  The news was not accepted uncritically. Running at this time was a controversy about the use of a photograph claimed to have been taken on 8 August, purporting to show five German aircraft shot down, plunging into the sea. Among those newspapers which had carried the photograph was the Yorkshire Post, on the front page of its 9 August edition. But the picture was a fake and the papers had to carry corrections, conveying a statement from the Air Ministry denying that it had been an official photograph, a correction which had also been broadcast by the BBC. As recorded by Home Intelligence, this episode fuelled suspicions that successes were being exaggerated, adding to popular mistrust of the media.33

  The Daily Express was moved to observe that the great trouble was that the defence departments did not take the people into their confidence sufficiently. They did not trust the people to take a realistic view of the facts. They held back items of good news, perhaps for fear the public’s hopes were raised too high. They held back items of bad news, perhaps for fear the public’s hopes should sink too low.

  Mixed messages were also coming from the German High Command. Although, ostensibly, the invasion of Britain was still on, Keitel sent a signal to all three of the armed forces’ chiefs. On the supposition, he wrote, that Sealion could not be carried out this year, and that the Italian offensive against the Suez Canal did not succeed, the possibility had to be faced that the Führer may decide to transfer German forces to the Italians.34

  With startling prescience, the Daily Express editorial this day repeated Churchill’s warning of the previous week that the danger of invasion had not passed, and that Britain was “not out of the wood”, then saying that “the wood” was not just the British Empire. It extended over many parts of the British Empire. Therefore, the Battle for Britain, the paper said, “may be fought around the region of the Suez Canal”.

  The next day, the delayed Eagle Attack was due to start. This was viewed by historians as the worst period for the RAF, when the Luftwaffe focused its attacks on airfields and infrastructure. But there was some relief to be gained from the shift in focus. The previous day had not only seen a high loss rate, 83 percent of RAF fighter pilots shot down had been killed. At that rate, there would no longer be a viable force within the month. For the Germans to move inland would be a blessing in disguise for the RAF. Their aircraft losses might increase, but more pilots would be saved.

  This day was going to be a busy for the Germans. There were preliminaries to be sorted before the big show got under way. The message had finally dawned on the Luftwaffe, though, that radar was playing a part in warning RAF pilots. Thus, for the first time, radar stations were deliberately targeted. Soon after dawn, in bright,
clear weather, a raid developed over the Channel. British controllers delayed scrambling fighters, wary of a feint. When Spitfires were put up, it became clear that the German move was indeed designed to draw off the fighters – a tactic implemented so successfully on 25 July and many times since. But, by nine o’clock, five radar stations were under attack. The airfield at Lympne was also bombed.

  Next, a formation of Stukas attacked convoys “Arena” and “Agent” in the Thames Estuary. HMTs Tamarisk and Pyrope were sunk. Twelve men were killed and four wounded. Simultaneously, an attack was mounted on “Snail” and “Cable” convoys. However, the main target was Portsmouth naval base. When the German bombers had finished, the harbour railway station had been destroyed, the pier demolished and a pontoon dock holed. Fires had broken out in several buildings including a brewery and a furniture store in the old town. Casualties were initially reported as 8 killed and 75 injured, although the final toll was 29 killed and 126 injured.35

  While Portsmouth was being hit, the Chain Home radar station in Ventnor, Isle of Wight, was knocked out by a number of well-placed bombs. British deception techniques concealed the extent of the damage, convincing the Germans that their attacks had been unsuccessful.

  By now, the focus was moving to RAF Manston. Numerous hits rendered it non-operational until the next day. Hawkinge was given some detailed attention and Lympne, which had already received 141 bombs, got another 100 which knocked it out of the action. The remainder of the attack force bombed Hastings and Dover, leaving jubilant Luftwaffe crews to celebrate a claimed seventy-one RAF aircraft destroyed. The success was illusory. Fighter Command had managed 732 sorties with the loss of twenty-three fighters, against the Luftwaffe’s actual twenty-eight losses, including eleven Me 109s and ten pilots. Bomber Command lost five – making the two sides exactly equal.36